We have to do better than this

While many might assume that the faithful would be morally repulsed by torture, the reality is the opposite. When poll respondents were asked, “Do you personally think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists amounted to torture, or not?” most Americans said the abuses did not constitute torture. But it was non-religious Americans who were easily the most convinced that the “enhanced interrogation techniques” were, in fact, torture.

The results in response to this question were even more striking: “All in all, do you think the CIA treatment of suspected terrorists was justified or unjustified?” For most Americans, the answer, even after recent revelations, was yes. For most Christians, it’s also yes. But for the non-religious, as the above chart makes clear, the torture was not justified.

In fact, looking through the poll’s crosstabs, non-religious Americans were one of the few subsets that opposed the torture techniques – and that includes breakdowns across racial, gender, age, economic, educational, and regional lines. The non-religious are effectively alone in their opposition to torture.

Well, I suspect that a more fine-grained analysis would find other groups that oppose it. I’d be surprised if Quakers were at all supportive.

I’m not exactly thrilled by the data. Atheists are a minority, so what this chart actually says is that a majority of Americans are either unaware of what was done, or they think waterboarding and ‘rectal feeding’ aren’t really torture. So that makes the overall message of the chart appalling.

And I’m not even satisfied with the atheists. 40% of atheists — let’s call them the Sam Harris atheists — think they can rationalize torturing other human beings. We either need to make deeper rifts or start proselytizing to the benighted and ignorant within our own community.

Comments

“…a majority of Americans are either unaware of what was done, or they think waterboarding and ‘rectal feeding’ aren’t really torture”
I don’t think it’s that, PZ. I think the majority of Americans believe that waterboarding an American is torture, but waterboarding an al-Qaeda member from, say, Lebanon is not. IOW, it’s not the action per se, but who commits it and to whom it is done that define whether or not the act in question is torture.

Its about time that the USA accepted its responsibilities as a nation and dumped the responsible parties in front of a war crimes commission, and that responsibility goes right to the top of the tree. The world at large is let with a vile smell coming from the USA and the comparative lack of guilt by the religious right is just too nauseating to contemplate.
What happened to the USA moral compass?

So many ways to look at these numbers. For me the most glaring thing is the general willingness of the American people to be ok with such sadism so long as it’s happening to others. This is cultural and needs to change.

I’m still trying to think of the most effective way to blast this issue out on Facebook. I think I have it but I need to get the phrasing perfect.

When I was a kid my father would read to me stories that placed a heavy emphasis on christian martyrdom. Some of these involved the former soviet union torturing christians. The descriptions of what were done to christians in those books is functionally identical to what america has done here. We are the bad guys.

Sam Harris is a “Sam Harris atheist”. But the 40% in that poll don’t merely “think they can rationalize torturing other human beings”. That 40% actually supports the actual CIA torture program. Those are two very different things.

What other religion has a torture device as their main icon? What religion celebrates the torture of it’s main character as the best thing that ever happened? What religions celebrate gory death by martyrdom as a desirable end? (Yeah, some of the Islamists have raised the bar on this one.)

Sam Harris is a “Sam Harris atheist”. But the 40% in that poll don’t merely “think they can rationalize torturing other human beings”. That 40% actually supports the actual CIA torture program. Those are two very different things.

Is that the one where genocide of the native population was fine because manifest destiny, the one where inconvenient immigrant political activists were deported without notice to a country at civil war, or maybe the one where it was considered perfectly valid to establish concentration camps for “enemy nationals” some of who were second or third generation citizens? Then there’s the one where torture was used for ‘research’ into brainwashing, with limited recordkeeping due to liability concerns and whose extant records were mostly destroyed when an investigatory committee was established to look into abuses by law enforcement and intelligence agencies after some of their tricks started seeing use against the presidential campaign of the opposing party.

And then there’s the little business of only getting the abolition of slavery through as a wartime ploy at least partly design to demoralize the opponent. But that one’s getting better known these days.

There is little that makes me more depressed than polls showing that the vast majority of Americans hold such abhorrent views. Though it’s been shown to me time and time again, I still manage to be freshly horrified on learning that the country I was raised in and raised to believe was good is not so good. My only consolation is that this is a human failing, not a uniquely American one. Humanity has to do better. What’s uniquely American is the notion of American exceptionalism.
What conservatives want us to believe American Exceptionalism means: America is, by the nature of her founding, morally superior to all other nations and that moral superiority will never be diminished.

What American Exceptionalism actually means to conservatives: No other place on earth lets us get as rich with as little regard for everyone else and if we have to crack a few eggs to make our omelette of gold, so be it.

What American Exceptionalism really means: We’re racist xenophobes who think that when other people do it, it’s heinous evil, when we do it, it’s justice served.

How can these people say that it was justified? It produced virtually no useful information and was likely used to generate the desired fake intelligence the Bush administration needed. So in the polled people’s mind, is torture for torture’s sake or even to get false justification for other actions justified if the people being tortured are “evil” enough?

(Granted even without it producing no legitimate intelligence I would say it wasn’t justified, but that alone should make people say the tactics weren’t.)

@sugarfrosted: Dick Cheney did essentially say that it was justified because some guys from Saudi Arabia flew planes into buildings and killed “3,000 Americans” (I wonder, when he made that statement, if he subtracted Muslim Americans or non Americans from the total death toll first). So yeah, essentially, to Cheney and apparently many other Americans, it is perfectly justified to torture brown people because some other brown people committed a heinous act. The brown people you torture need not have any actual connection to the ones who committed the heinous act, they just have to generally come from the same region of the world within a generation or two of ancestry.

Views on the CIA’s tactics break down sharply along ideological lines. Liberal Democrats are most disgusted with the agency’s actions, while conservative Republicans are most likely to defend it.

Democrats who identify as moderate or conservative are more supportive of the program, joining majorities of independents and Republicans who say it was justified.

Once it again to goes to show how fucking useful “moderate” Democrats are.

Though in fairness the actual phrasing of the question is:

“Looking ahead, do you feel that torture of suspected terrorists can be justified, sometimes justified, rarely justified, or never justified”

So they aren’t supporting the CIA’s torture, they are actually just saying that, in theory, they think that future torture could be justified. Which is….not better at all, actually. Actually it is fucking WORSE, because the graphic above, showing how many people are saying it is “unjustified” include two groups: those that say that it can never be justified and those saying that it is rarely justified. The unjustified category in the chart above includes people who still think torture should be left on the table, just in case. No, not even “enhanced interrogation techniques”: there were no buzz words or spin to hide the fact that what they are asking about is whether or not fucking outright torture is permissible. What was that about American moral authority again?

And then there’s the little business of only getting the abolition of slavery through as a wartime ploy at least partly design to demoralize the opponent.

Only? You’ve a funny idea of how politics and history work. The war certainly made it easier to push through and added impetus, but Lincoln already opposed slavery. Many in Congress were fiercely opposed to it. I prefer a more nuanced view of history. One where Lincoln was no angel, but also not the villain that unreconstructed Southerner’s cast him as when they created the story that the war was never about slavery and the North only stopped it to demoralized them.

47% of Americans think the torture report was “unfair” and 52% think it was wrong to release the report.
53% of Americans think torture gave us important information.
57% think that the torturers should face no charges.

And, as for the question I was talking about:

17% said often justified
40% said sometimes justified
19% said rarely justified
20% said never justified.

So essentially 57% of Americans definitely support torture, add in the extra “rarely justified” group for 76 fucking percent saying that torture is on the fucking table. Only 20% of Americans oppose torture to the degree that a decent human being would. Only 1 in 5 Americans would refuse to break the Geneva Conventions in the holy name of 9/11. Only 1 in 5 Americans would refuse to commit war crimes and atrocities in the name of American Exceptionalism. America is Exceptionally above the fucking law. America is so moral and righteous that it is allowed to commit the most vile fucking deeds in the name of Truth, Justice, and the American Way. Torture is acceptable as long as America is doing it, and only America.

I guess there’s a danger in saying that America has never had a moral compass and we’ve always been this bad. We can’t let that acknowledgement lead us to give up and say “Well I guess there’s no point in us trying harder”

What I meant by that ‘only’ was not ‘that was the only impetus’ but ‘that was the reason it actually made it through’. It was not supposed to be a dig at Lincoln, but at the fact that even without the heartland of U.S. slavery, emancipation could only be sold as, essentially, an act of war, with exceptions and complications that really shouldn’t have been needed. (It was then rapidly extended, as everyone knew it would. And I would criticise the abolition of the slave trade by the British in much the same way, so this is not an “America sucks” rant.)

U Frood @ 26:

I just find the idea of a national ‘moral compass’ to be intricately tied up with exceptionalism more generally. A lot of US liberalism is predicated on the notion that the current authoritarian elitist system is some sort of perversion of what the country has done through history – but that’s just plain wrong. That doesn’t mean there’s no point in trying to do better, but could you please just base it on being better people rather than “living up to the ideals America was founded on”?

Christians’ primary symbol is that of a man being flogged, stabbed, and hung on a crucifix – an act that they revere and glorify as central to their ethos of alleged redemption.
The results of this poll surprise me not at all.

@Odin (#28): I still disagree with your thesis. The north had reached its limit of tolerating slavery. It was going to be ended very soon, even the south knew it. There were a lot of reasons for the war, but the south fundamentally seceded because they knew that. The war just sped things up a bit.

Strictly speaking the non-religious are a larger group than just atheists and even then only a small majority considered the CIA tactics unjustified. BTW a Pew Forum survey of a few years ago agrees with this more recent survey on who supports and does not support torture.

Quakers would oppose but you need either a survey specifically targeted at Quakers or a very large one to get enough Quakers to make a significant finding; there are only some 87,000 Quakers in the US (in contrast the Southern Baptists claim about 46,000 churches). I would guess that progressive Christians would also tend on the whole to oppose torture (see Fred Clark at Slacktivist) and also Unitarian Universalists (who will also have some affiliated atheists). The Catholic hierarchy for once is on the right side and opposes it though not as loudly as it could and as the poll shows the majority of white Catholics feel the CIA was justified.

I assume you’re quoting someone, but I gotta ask, “who said this?” I ask cuz the news media around me only focuses on all the politicos declaring, “the Prez is doing something totally illegally.” (regardless of his actual action) I can only conceive of Cheney sayin this, in reference to the time W Bush was in office; simultaneously ordering all these horrific actions, and denying they’re occurring.

@Kimpatsu:1
ISIS got the western world going batshit over the beheading videos. I just wonder what the impact would be if they took one or more of their American prisoners and waterboarded them, did rectal hydrations/feeding, etc., and then after they were completely broken sent them home? Would American attitudes towards those techniques change?

One of the driving forces for creating international laws/treaties regarding the treatment of prisoners was to help ensure that our soldiers would be treated humanely if captured. If we don’t treat prisoners humanely, how much can we scream about moral decency if our adversaries reciprocate?

I remember that being said in reference to Bush. Also, I wonder if American exceptionalism is even unique to America. I think roggg is right and it’s a view held by the dominant superpower of any time, e.g. the Roman empire. Funny though, the idea that America isn’t even special in its idea that it is special.

I’m surprised Bush didn’t come out with a “torturing them there so we don’t have to torture them here” justification.

That some people even dare to use the efficacy of the torture (which isn’t true anyway) to justify it is the scariest part for me. Torturing a detainee’s child in front of him may also yield intel, so all they’re saying is that would be justified too. *shudder* Fuck every single person who justifies torture of anyone for any reason.

Exceptionalism definitely isn’t something unique to the USA. I think pretty much every country has a lot of people who consider it “special” in some way or another. It just tends to be more obvious when that country is powerful.

Why do most Americans consider torture justified? My guess is that lots and lots of people in the US think that the “ticking time bomb” scenario is actually realistic. That plus a dehumanizing view of “the enemy” are more than enough to push most people into justifying horrible things.

I find it terrifying that so many of the sickening pro-torture brigade honestly do seem to think that the unrebuttable core of their position is the argumentum ad Jack Bauer. It doesn’t matter how often you tell them that a TV show is not a good model for actual reality, they still seem to think that what Keifer Southerland pretends to do in 24 (along with various other shows where torture is depicted as being a totes necessary and effective tool of the notional ‘good guys’) somehow proves that torture (sorry, ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ – totally a different thing amiright?) works and that one must be prepared to do ‘what needs to be done’ to keep ‘Merica/the free world safe.

They are entirely immune to reason and evidence, and simply refuse to deal with the small problem that all torture does is force the vicitm to say what they think the torturer wants to hear, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality. And in most cases the torturer cannot be sure if their victim is actually in any way involved in terrorism, so often they are torturing innocent people in order to make them give up ‘intel’ about something they actually know nothing about.

And if the torturer does wind up torturing an actual terrorist, and that terrorist actually has useful intelligence (both unlikely), then if that terrorist is able to resist the torture for just a little while, and then feign ‘breaking down’ reasonably convincingly, then they can feed whatever line they want to the torturers, and it will be taken as the absolute truth because of the magic truthiness of information procured under torture – it is practically inviting your enemy to feed you false intelligence and lead your forces into a trap.

And yet despite all the glaringly self evident failings of torture to even be effective (leaving aside for the moment its abominable moral character), you still get legions of idiots saying ‘yeah its horrible, but it works, so we should use it’.

Honestly if you added a category to this poll that asked the pro-torture respondents why they think torture is justified, and for those that answered ‘because it gets results’ added a further question about why they believed that torture got results, the answers you got would probably be illuminating and worrying in equal measure, and the number of people who mentioned Jack bloody Bauer in their answers would likely be enough to make one despair for humanity (again).

Also, I wonder if American exceptionalism is even unique to America. I think roggg is right and it’s a view held by the dominant superpower of any time, e.g. the Roman empire. Funny though, the idea that America isn’t even special in its idea that it is special.

It is not original at all. During the shameful period of British Empire, we Limeys gifted the world with the nauseatingly bombastic and nationalistic saying ‘god is an Englishman’. Those four little words pack so much oppressive evil into their modest dimensions it is hard to credit. Though claiming the mantle of a genocidal, capricious and sadistic sky fairy seems appropriate for the globe-girdling exercise in unfettered greed – fueled by the propogation of human misery and suffering – that was the empire.

In many ways the US is simply repeating all of our Imperialist mistakes and outright crimes, except now it is all happening in the digital (and, ominously, nuclear) age.

They are entirely immune to reason and evidence, and simply refuse to deal with the small problem that all torture does is force the vicitm to say what they think the torturer wants to hear, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality.

I have been tortured. During the final episode, I told my torturer that yes, I would eventually say what he wanted me to say, but it wouldn’t be true. And that I would make the promises required, but I wouldn’t keep them.

That didn’t even slow the proceedings down. I eventually said what I was told to, made the empty promises. And even then, it just went on. And on.

The point never was to find the truth or force an action; that was just a pretext.

Today’s torturers know this, and I suspect that many of their supporters do, too. I doubt that intel was ever the purpose, at all. Punishment, maybe, but vicarious punishment, in the body of some substitute for the real offender.

Christians are good with vicarious punishment; it’s the whole point of the crucifixion. The sinless victim carrying the guilt of evil sinners in his body.

I am so sorry to hear that such an awful thing happened to you. And I agree completely that garnering intelligence is not even really the goal for the vast majority of torturers; as you say, it is just a pretext for (usually vicarious) punishment. I also think that you are right that many supporters of torture also know this, which makes the figures in the poll mentioned in the OP even more horrifying.

Except that I think you’re right about punishment. It’s often a ‘someone must pay’ mentality. Whether that someone had squat to do with what is avenged, well, whatever.

And yes, senior officials who crafted the U.S. torture program really do need to be charged. There are a host of reasons…

One I find particularly compelling: because one of them still says he’d do it again.

To which I think his nation and the world really do have to say, for both his benefit, and for that of any who might seek to emulate him, under a later administration: um, no, actually, you won’t. As you’ll find this impractical, from prison.

Your typical American would call a parent refusing to criticize a child’s dangerous mistakes a bad parent, and in the breath, call a person refusing to criticize the country for its dangerous mistakes a good patriot.

Yes, of course, because it’s completely different depending on whether you’re the Good Guys or the Bad Guys. Even the bible is chock full of similar examples. This is the thing you libruls and your ideology of moral relativism just cannot ever seem to understand.

Your typical American would call a parent refusing to criticize a child’s dangerous mistakes a bad parent, and in the breath, call a person refusing to criticize the country for its dangerous mistakes a good patriot.

My guess is that the sort of people who are willing to believe in religious authority no matter what are also more prone to believe in governmental authority no matter what. This study shows correlation, not causation. It would be a mistake to take this as some sign that god-belief is somehow making people approve of torture. That idea reeks too much of demonizing the opposition.

I’m surprised it hasn’t been pointed out yet, but the binary in the chart PZ posted is misleading. It appears the chart is actually showing the disparity between “Often Justified/Sometimes Justified” vs. “Rarely Justified/Never Justified”, with the former color-coded as “Justified” and the latter color-coded as “Not Justified”.

The mind boggles – how could anyone conceivably categorize the sentiment “Torture is rarely justified” as a subset of “Torture is not justified”?? I can’t help but suspect a concocted effort to paint “No Religion” as a bastion wherein a majority hold to moral upright standards; when in truth, along with all other demographics of American adults, it falls far short.

This, even compared to an 80/20 split for all American adults, lays to waste any argument that moral repugnance hinges on religious beliefs. In light of these numbers, “We have to do better than this” becomes an understatement of epic proportion.

Far more unsettling (to me) is the age breakdown. For most issues pertaining to social justice, I’m able to take at least a little solace in data showing that societal bigotry is slowly being phased out with the dying off of our so-called “greatest generation”.

And I agree completely that garnering intelligence is not even really the goal for the vast majority of torturers; as you say, it is just a pretext for (usually vicarious) punishment. I also think that you are right that many supporters of torture also know this, which makes the figures in the poll mentioned in the OP even more horrifying.

Horrifying, but not surprising. We’re after all talking about the country where there’s still majority support for the death penalty.

I occasionally have to remind myself that revenge is a thing in America.

My guess is that the sort of people who are willing to believe in religious authority no matter what are also more prone to believe in governmental authority no matter what. This study shows correlation, not causation. It would be a mistake to take this as some sign that god-belief is somehow making people approve of torture. That idea reeks too much of demonizing the opposition.

I’m not sure who exactly was seizing upon this to talk about the moral superiority of atheists around here. Regardless, you are right. I’m guessing that the support of torture is facilitated by Right-Wing Authoritarianism (basically the same thing you described). Religious people just are more likely to be that.

kevinkirkpatrick:

I’m surprised it hasn’t been pointed out yet, but the binary in the chart PZ posted is misleading.

*cough* *cough*

The mind boggles – how could anyone conceivably categorize the sentiment “Torture is rarely justified” as a subset of “Torture is not justified”??

I know. It is fucking depressing that even the small amount of people ostensibly saying that torture is “unjustified” are still essentially saying that it is. The “unjustified” side is already a minority, and yet they STILL needed to throw in some fence-sitting torture proponents to get it so that torture proponents weren’t fucking QUADRUPLE the number of opponents.

I can’t help but suspect a concocted effort to paint “No Religion” as a bastion wherein a majority hold to moral upright standards; when in truth, along with all other demographics of American adults, it falls far short.

Not sure if that was rationale for the categorization. Mindless symmetry is probably more at work (“lump in the two categories on the left, lump in the two categories on the right, graph it, bing, bang, boom, let’s go get a beer”). Regardless, it wasn’t just to make the Godless look good: hiding the “rarely justified” in the “unjustified” category masks the moral depravity of EVERY group surveyed.

Far more unsettling (to me) is the age breakdown. For most issues pertaining to social justice, I’m able to take at least a little solace in data showing that societal bigotry is slowly being phased out with the dying off of our so-called “greatest generation”…..
14%? WTF ??…

Also, so much for the notion that with collegiate education comes greater adherence to Egalitarian standards:

Jesus Christ, just when I thought these results couldn’t get any more depressing.

I seriously hope that this poll was botched or fucked up in some way. It is anyway accurate, then the culture war is basically lost. If this poll is accurate, American culture is irredeemably poisoned, and American morality is completely gone. I thought we were making progress. Maybe we were on some issues, or certain sections of the country. But if this poll shows the actual present state of Amercian political thought and ethics, then it is game over. 80% of the country are in favor of the most vicious, immoral action we have the words to describe. It is hard to get worse than that. That is just fucking Monstrous. And if education doesn’t help, and if the youngest generations are the most willing to go along with the idea that torture is an acceptable tactic…..then that’s it. The chances of it getting better are virtually nil.